RE: 1st Working Draft of Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization Published

In the CJK case, it looks funny if ONLY the month has the ideographic character and the year/day do not. One must be careful with blanket statements to developers :-)

2004-4月-8

~Addison

Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods | Delivering Global Business Visibility
http://www.webMethods.com
Chair, W3C Internationalization (I18N) Working Group
Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force
http://www.w3.org/International

Internationalization is an architecture. 
It is not a feature.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Martin Duerst
> Sent: jeudi 8 avril 2004 23:11
> To: Richard Ishida; 'Jungshik Shin'
> Cc: public-i18n-geo@w3.org
> Subject: RE: 1st Working Draft of Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML
> Internationalization Published
> 
> 
> 
> At 20:00 04/04/08 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Jungshik Shin [mailto:jshin@i18nl10n.com]
> > > Sent: 10 October 2003 01:09
> 
> > >  In 14.1 Date & Time, it's adised that 'words for the month
> > > be used and an example (02 mar 2004) is given. I'm not sure
> > > of the wisdom of this.
> > > For speakers of European languages, that may be a good
> > > advice, but for East Asian users, that doesn't seem to as
> > > good (and I'm not sure of other regions/languages). At the
> > > minimum, YYYY-MM-DD format (as specified in ISO 8601) should
> > > be mentioned as a rather universal and
> > > culture/language-neutral alternative.
> >
> >We felt that YYYY-MM-DD format has a fairly technical bias, and is not
> >always the preferred form for a particular locale, although it could be
> >useful in some circumstances.  We also note that pages are in a given
> >language most of the time, and one might generally expect month 
> names to be
> >recognised in most situations, though that might not hold for certain
> >special types of reference page aimed at a reader who doesn't need to
> >understand the language text. So we think the guidelines should say
> >something like: consider YYYY-MM-DD, especially when dealing with an
> >international audience, or use the month name if a local format is more
> >appropriate.  (Of course, this doesn't apply in quite the same 
> way for CJK,
> >since the month name is a number plus character. That should be 
> explained.)
> 
> As one of the originators and/or pushers for having a named month,
> I have to apologize to Jungshik and others for not having thought about
> the CJK case. I think the solution proposed by Richard ('month name', with
> an explanation for the CJK case) is a step in the right direction.
> But maybe we should word this more neutrally, e.g.
> 
>     Indicate the month in a way that clearly identifies it as a month.
>       - In languages where month names are customarily used, use 
> month names.
>       - In other languages (e.g. Chinese/Japanese/Korean), use the month
>         number with the character for 'month'.
> 
> Does this cover all languages, as far as we know, or are there
> languages that don't fit in this pattern?
> Please note that I wrote "month names are customarily used" rather
> than "month names exist", because e.g. Japanese has traditional
> words for months, but they are no longer in daily use.
> 
> 
> Regards,    Martin.

Received on Friday, 9 April 2004 13:29:18 UTC